We study a partnership that anticipates its possible dissolution. In our model, partnerships form in order to take advantage of complementary skills; although new opportunities may arise that make partners' skills useless. We characterize the optimal, incentive-compatible partnership contract...

We analyze a competitive labor market in which workers signal their productivities through education à la Spence (1973), and firms have the option of auditing to learn workers’ productivities. Audits are costly and non–contractible. We characterize the trade–offs between signaling by...

We analyse incentive problems in team and partnership structures where the only available information to condition a contract on is some noisy ranking of the partners' efforts. This enables us to ensure both first best efficient effort levels for all partners and the redistribution of output...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

The literature on partnership dissolution generally takes the dissolution decision as given and examines whether the outcome is efficient. A well-known result is that <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$k+1$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi>k</mi> <mo>+</mo> <mn>1</mn> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>-price auctions dissolve a partnership efficiently when the share structure is sufficiently close to equal....</equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation>

This article analyzes simple rules for dissolving a common value partnership in which one partner holds proprietary information. The winner’s bid auction and the loser’s bid auction are payoff equivalent and both favor the informed partner. If it is verifiable which partner is informed, the...

We analyze incentive problems in team and partnership structures where the only available information to condition a contract on is a partial and noisy ranking which specifies who comes first in efforts among the competing partners. This enables us to ensure both first-best efficient effort...